Aristotelian and/or Nietzschean Narratology

Résumé En

David Herman's famous distinction between classical narratology, oriented on textual analysis, and post-classical narratology, inserted in a communicative and interactive context, is undoubtedly the fundamental starting point for who wants to analyze the history of narratology. It certainly has the advantage of clearly showing an evolution within narratological studies. However, there are also limitations to this distinction: the one which, in my view, is the main one, is that of dividing the history of narratology into two distinct time periods, with the risk of interpreting this distinction as a way of "breaking" and to ignore the importance of the results obtained by the authors of classical narratology. The aim of my presentation would be to propose an alternative view of the history of narratology based on the distinction between "Aristotelian narratology" on one side and "Nietzschean narratology" on the other one. The theories that are part of Aristotelian narratology, which bring together authors, among others, such as Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman, Wayne Booth, Marie-Laure Ryan, Monika Fludernik and David Herman, share the view of the narrative text understood as a self-sufficient "totality" which would be "naturally" recognized by the reader as a part of his daily experience, whereas for Nietzschean narratology, which would include authors such as Paul de Man, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Wolfgang Iser, Daniel Punday and Andrew Gibson, narrativity would be based on a radical negativity and on the impossibility of structuring a global and definitive sense of literary experience. This distinction has the advantage of avoiding overly clear temporal determinations that distinguish classical narratology (60-70) and post-classical (80-present), by offering a homogeneous, branched view, of the narratological field.